Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (31 page)

“Yesterday I got a call from the police. They told me someone had rented a safe deposit box using my fingerprints. Weird, right?”

Dead silence from the task force and the FBI; then from outside of the ambulance came Santino’s sharp: “Son of a
bitch!
”

“Okay,” Rachel said. “We’ll definitely look into that.”

There was a knock on the door and Phil let himself into the ambulance. “Hey, Graham,” he nodded at the disembodied Agent, then placed a plastic bag of unisex clothes next to Ellen. “Sorry to meet you under these circumstances,” Phil said to her. “Are you doing okay?”

Ellen Lewis was far from okay, but she nodded and tried to smile. 

“All right,” Rachel scanned the ambulance, taking stock of the storage compartments. “I’m going to update the FBI. Phil will stay with you,” she said, and put an assuring hand on Ellen’s shoulder when the woman bloomed with anxiety. “He’s an Agent, too. He’ll be your intermediary with your brother.

“And keep drinking, all right?” Rachel opened a lower compartment and found Ellen another bottle of water. “You’re lucky you didn’t broil alive.”

Rachel hopped down from the ambulance and shut the door to keep the cool air in, leaving Phil and his phone to facilitate conversation between the Lewis twins. Gallagher was waiting outside for her. They stepped around the ambulance to stand in its shade.

This time, the SAC had no problem meeting Rachel’s eyes. “We usually have to run a full AV system if we want to sit in on a private interview,” Gallagher told her.

Rachel shrugged. “Hopefully the connection went through. It’s pretty new to me, so I’m still working out the kinks.”

Gallagher nodded. “It did. I’ve got BOLO alerts on the police car and the truck, and I’ve put out notice for possible satellite tracking. Since we’ve narrowed the time frame, we might be able to get an image of the truck.”

Satellites.
Rachel glanced skyward. Some of the others enjoyed the occasional out-of-body excursion to orbit, but she had never gone herself. Space was well beyond the range she imposed on the world of chattering things, and it was far enough away so she had never heard one as it passed overhead. She wondered how hard it would be to reach out and ping one, wondered if it might be necessary to catch Glazer.

Wondered if Glazer, with all his technological prowess, could hack a satellite.

“What are you thinking?” Gallagher’s colors had shifted, a trace of Rachel’s own Southwestern turquoise core showing. Rachel hid a grin behind a hand; the SAC’s opinion of Rachel had changed during her interview with Ellen Lewis.

“Just whether we should trust any information we get, unless there’s a human being involved. All of the data we’ve gotten from Glazer has been corrupted. He likes to play games but there was more than one reason for leaving Lewis: we can believe what she says. She’s a lead that finally goes somewhere real.”

Gallagher’s conversational colors shifted heavily towards Rachel’s core in agreement. “Good point. Thank you for your help, Agent Peng.”

Rachel knew a dismissal when she heard one. She headed back to her small group, still standing apart from the others. 

Santino was livid. “This is our fault,” he said, pacing. “We’ve known every single thing Glazer’s done so far had been micromanaged. We should have dug into the teacher’s background, or…

“None of you guys knew her?” Santino rounded on Rachel and Jason. 

“Maybe?” Rachel threw up her hands. “Graham’s a drinking buddy. I knew he had a twin sister but I’ve never met her.”

“Name three hundred and fifty people you work with,” Jason said. “Then name all of their siblings. Or tell me if they know someone else’s siblings.”

Santino snorted in disgust but didn’t respond.

“Besides, most of us aren’t that close with our families,” Rachel added. “There’s probably a lot of people out there who don’t even realize they’ve got relatives in OACET.” She said it just to see Hill’s reaction, but his colors didn’t change.
Man has no idea,
she thought.
Mako, too, probably.

Hurry up and wait. Their moment of usefulness had passed, and they were back on the sidelines until another came around. Rachel was used to it. Hill, too. The others chafed and paced. When the satellite images of Glazer’s truck came in, Rachel pushed Jason’s credentials as a digital expert on Gallagher until the SAC took him off of Rachel’s hands. She breathed a silent sigh of relief as Jason and his angry energy went to join the FBI.

Fifteen minutes later, he called to her over the link.
“They’re leaving.”
She watched as Jason, still cloistered with the feds, accompanied Gallagher and most of her team as they started to clear out of the field.
“They can’t do anything more here.”

“Stick with them,”
she told him.
“See how far you can get before they drop you. Phil?”

“Coming,”
the small Agent said. The ambulance door opened and he dropped lightly to the ground.
“Ellen’s calmed down. I think she’ll be fine. The FBI’s bringing her back to D.C. for a formal interview.”

“What about Graham?”

“He’ll get a ride to the Hoover Building and meet her there,”
Phil said, then added:
“I gave Ellen my phone.”

“Good thinking,”
she replied. Phil had LoJacked their witness. As long as Ellen kept Phil’s phone on her, Graham could find his sister anywhere.

They set out across the field, retracing their path through the beaten grass. Jason was waiting for them by the road as the FBI drove away; no space for the Agent. His colors were damp and lonely. Rachel pushed aside his resemblance to a dumped family pet before it provoked a laugh.

The drive was quiet. Rachel turned off the emotional spectrum. Everyone was keeping their thoughts to themselves, and those were harshly gray. She was almost drowsing when their SUV shifted, Zockinski jumping two lanes of traffic to keep up with the sudden change in direction of the FBI’s caravan. 

“Dinner?”
Jason reached out to her through the link. He sounded hungry, and Rachel idly wondered if it was actually possible for a person to sound hungry or if her own moods were piggybacking on his. 

“Ready to eat?”
She poked Phil. 

He sighed.
“Always.”

Rachel thought back over her day. She hadn’t eaten anything other than the occasional snack since she and Zockinski had gorged themselves on overpriced museum croissants. There had been some sneaking off to the side in the cornfield, but nobody had enjoyed a proper bathroom break in hours.

They pulled off at a wreck of a strip mall with more empty stores than customers, a Subway and a McDonald’s the last remaining signs of commerce. Gallagher gave everybody a firm thirty minutes, to be cut short without notice. Most of the FBI started walking towards the sandwich shop, but some headed towards the fast food restaurant at the other end of the parking lot. The group from First District Station broke up, the police moving towards the American equivalent of health food, while the cyborgs pled the need for coffee that hadn’t been boiled in the same pot since noon and gravitated towards the calories.

It was an old McDonald’s and hadn’t yet been renovated into a polished plastic café. This one had an agricultural theme, with farm hand tools nailed to the walls and a row of stationary saddles where the stools should be. Rachel ran her fingertips over one of these on her way to the counter; hard leather, shiny from decades of dropped fries and jeans. It’d be gone soon, plowed under when the building was razed to the ground, the old broken character of the place turned into so many pieces of brick. She had read the cost analysis of what it took to renovate old buildings and bring them up to code, and there was a definite logic in starting from scratch, but it seemed wasteful in a different way.

They got their meals, found a table far away from those few from the FBI, and soaked in the grease. 

“This is going to kill me,”
Phil complained.

He was not referring to the cholesterol. Rachel patted her purse.
“Energy bars,”
she said.
“I brought enough for all of us. Just snack when you take a bathroom break.” 

Jason snorted around a huge bite of his burger.
“Men don’t have to piss fifty times a day. That’d be almost as suspicious as eating all the damned time.”

They stopped talking to concentrate on their food. When the last of her fried chicken sandwich was gone, Rachel drew a breath and slouched forward, sated.
“Think we can get away with shakes?”
She balled up the last paper wrapper and dropped it on her tray.
“I’m not sure when we’ll get another chance to eat. The kids, Glazer, those RFID readers… I don’t see us getting another meal in tonight.”

“Oh yeah,”
Jason said, and put down his third burger.
“Rachel? I forgot. Here.”

He reached out and grabbed her nearest wrist.

“What’s up?”
Rachel started to ask, and then she felt the new autoscript worm its way into her mind. She yanked her hand away from him and barely stopped herself before it completed the arc towards his face.

“Asshole!” she hissed aloud.

“Rachel! What…” Phil, engrossed in his food, had turned at the exact moment to see her nearly punch Jason. It took him a moment to guess what had happened. Rachel, furious, rubbing her wrist; Jason, annoyed and self-righteous… Phil’s colors drained out of him. “Jason, you didn’t!”

“It’s the same RFID reader script I gave you this morning,” Jason glared at Phil, then back at Rachel. “Grow up,” he said to her. 

She had to keep herself from clawing at her own skin. “I didn’t ask for this.”

He shrugged and picked up his burger.
“Like we asked for any of this.”

The restaurant muttered in data. Little plastic tags hidden in boxes chirped names, dates, and locations at her. Machines kept shouting their batch numbers. Down the hall, a copier kept telling her it was overdue for servicing, and every computer, each credit card, and the security badges worn by the FBI three tables down chimed like hollow clocks. It was worse than the usual clamor of the digital ecosystem. This was not a passive environment; these devices wanted to talk to her.

She pressed her fists against her temples. “How do you shut it off?”

“It’s already off,” Jason said, shaking his head. “The script doesn’t activate unless you’ve scanned an RFID tag.”

She nearly went to hit him again, but closed her eyes and grabbed the edge of the table instead. Her fingernails skidded across the old laminate.
“I’m almost never not scanning, idiot.”

Jason slowly lowered his hands, the self-righteous blues fading. “Oh shit, Rachel. I didn’t think.”

“Yeah, I got that,” she said. 

“Rachel, I—
”

“Quiet.” She cut him off and put her hands over her ears as she wrestled with frequencies. The majority of RFID tags around them were the cheap disposable kind and she could weed those out by dropping the microwave and radio bands from her environment scans, but those on the copier and food machines were more complex and broadcast their own signals. She had heard all of these before but they were just more of the ever-present white noise; now, they spoke, crickets and locusts that begged her for restocking or to change their ink. “How do you get rid of the active tags?”

“Oh God, Rachel, I don’t think you can,” Phil said, deeply gray. “I just ignore them.”

“Shit. I can’t do that,” she whispered, and gave up and shut down all radio. The room lost detail and depth as she shut away those familiar frequencies, but the passive tags were silenced.

The active tags howled on.

“You will fix this,” Rachel snarled at Jason. His expression was fuzzy but she knew that was her own fault. “I’m not giving up radio or microwave. They’re my staples. Can I delete the script, or overwrite it, or what?”

They didn’t know; no one had tried to eliminate an autoscript before. Phil put a general call out through the link for advice, and Jason flinched when Josh responded with a harsh:
“He did what?!?”

“Rachel?”
Jason pleaded as the collective beat him down.
“I am so sorry.”

“I know,”
she said. The emotional spectrum was not carried by radio frequencies: Jason was miserable.
“But you fucking ask first. Always.”

Across the room, the FBI suddenly burst into bright colors. 

“Oh, what now?”
Rachel asked the others. They didn’t know, and she could barely make out the outlines of the Special Agents as they stood and frantically gathered their trash. She sighed and flipped on radio frequencies. The FBI bloomed into high definition and the RFID tags on their badges and credit cards welcomed her back. Outside, Gallagher and her team were driving towards them across the parking lot, multiple cars in a quick-moving line as they came to pick up their missing members. She could track each of them by the name and credentials in their wallets. 

Maybe this wasn’t so bad. Maybe the radio signals were just another layer of data within her already-saturated environment. She had taught herself to see through walls and to stay sane in the midst of the emotional maelstrom around her; maybe she could learn how to use these, too.